not quite moving on...

THANK YOU to everyone who sent their condolences and happy wishes for Monkey. It has been a hard couple of days, and all of your good energy and love has really helped us along. And I think I am going to start a notebook for us of all the 'coincidences' that keep happening to us since he's been gone. Ryan commented on yesterday's post one that I forgot: Sublime's "Badfish" was playing while he was transitioning out and the line was "I got no quarrel with God/Ain't got no time to get old/Lord knows I'm weak/Won't somebody get me off of this reef?" and then last night when I was going to bed, I said good night to Ruckus (sleeping on the couch) and then good night to Ryan and then looked up to say good night to Monkey (someplace in the sky) and there was a tiny orange moth right above my head that landed on the ceiling in a heart shape.

One of my favorite physical attributes of Monkey's was his lemur-like tail. It was so pretty and stripe-y and you always knew his mood by his tail. When he was thinking, it would tick-tock back and forth at the tip. When he was frustrated (say, if you were cradling him singing "Sweet Baby") it would tick-tock fast and sometimes whip around. My dad used to tell me that you knew cats were thinking when their tails were in the air, and I never doubted that with Monkey. He was always thinking about something although who knows what? Calculus, probably. Heck, he's the only indoor-only white guy-raised cat that I know who spoke Spanish*. So in rememberance, I am knitting a thin scarf of orange and white stripes out of 'ultra soft' yarn. There is a lot of alchemy in knitting -- casting stitches and spells, spinning yarns -- that is about the creation of a story as much as it is a creation of an object. I think it will be a fitting tribute, and something tangible for me to pet and fondle. And when it blows around in the wind, maybe I'll get an inkling of what it's thinking... now where is my Spanish dictionary?





*Once when Jenn and I came home, Monkey was sitting on the couch watching TV that he had turned on himself with the remote under his arm and he was intently watching Telemundo. He gave us a quick acknowledgement "great, you're here" and then went back to watching his telenovelas.